Neat. The suggested retail price is not bad, considering. About $40. But that is higher than a low end PC keyboard. The calculators that TI is making it for are the ones with the flash memory. TI-89, TI-92 Plus, TI-200, TI-83 Plus and TI-83 Silver. They will require each a new OS to be loaded. Hay the TI-82 and the TI-85 didn't support machine code by TI. Someone here will no doubt write assembly language programs, software for each of these other calculators. The TI-83 plus and silver are not slated to support using the keyboard for program input. That will probably be the first ticalc support programs to be devised. Anyway this all remains to be seen.

How long will it take us to write our own drivers for the 82, 83, 85, 86, 92?
(My guess is three weeks...)
w00t!

Six days, and on the seventh day we rest and say that it is good.

PLAY MEGAMAN86. ITS COOL, YO.

*God strikes slimey_limey because he copied his line in Genesis*

Which verse? ;)

I'll probably get one of these keyboards from amazon.com or something.

And could someone tell me what's so cool about "MEGAMAN86"?

Finall, how do you pronounce "w00t!"?

Not sure which verse.

MegaMan86 is hard to control, in my opinion.

(I think) w00t! is pronounced just as if the zeros were Os (woot!)

I think I can already say fairly confidently how the keyboard will work, based on the fact it works on the 89/92+ in the OS. It most likely will send the keycode values in TI-OS link protocol whenever a key is pressed. Thus, if we can figure out a way to read input in the 83+ silent hook, it could be possible to read the 89 keycodes and execute the 83+ equivalents, so the keyboard would work in the OS.

Cool! (or should that be w00t!)
If you make this app, I might even buy the keyboard!
If you do, though, you should integrate it with OmniCalc- same 'genre' of program, and people with just 160k ROM will not benefit from yet *another* app taking up space.

My two pence on the idea (I'm British- we don't use cents).

I'm not quite sure it's possible yet, but I'll look into it.

If you look carefully, the TI says that on the 89 the keyboard will be able to type anywhere (including program editing and such), but on the 83+(se) the keyboard will only be able to type in TI's apps. It looks like the keyboard will send the 89 key equivalents.

Your ALIVE!!! You haven't posted in a while...

I haven't posted in a while because of the idiotic comments that usually plague these news items. However, this article seems to actually have a calculator-related discussion going, so I decided to contribute :)

PARADE! (just kidding)

PLAY MEGAMAN86. ITS COOL, YO.

KILL LSVLLHS15. ITS COOL, YO.

aw... :(

thats because its still less than a day old

see, if you searrch articals for "16 june" (set the date for the day it came out), you will find on topic stuff. (note: void doesnt count)

Why doesn't the Void article count?--oh yeah, you and a couple of other people contributed about 2/3 of the posts in that discussion, all of them trolls.

Also, ticalc.org's code doesn't let you sort out comments in any manner--you have to rely on the news editors to get rid of comments you don't like and leave comments you would like, had you seen them. Slash, however, lets you sort out the good from the bad and almost never deletes comments.

Well I saw in the Archives a program called Remote by a David L. (His e-mail addresse has a Sweden extention) The program is written in Assembly for the TI-83 plus. It allows one using a TI-83 plus to control another TI-83 plus by way of the link cable. I would think if one can control a TI-83 plus via the graph link cable by means of another TI-83 plus, some kind of assembly progran could no doubt be added to give the TI-83 plus full access via this keyboard.

Yeah, I have that program on the calculator.
ME: Here, give me your calculator, I have a new game.
FRIEND: Ok, here you go. (hands over calculator)
ME: (run REMOTE.) Oops...
FRIEND: What's wrong? Hey! Where are all my games? grr...

HAHA! That's cool!

*silent link hook

Oh it's possible. One lookup table is all it will take...just a matter of DOING it. I got too much crap going on right now.

PLAY MEGAMAN86. ITS COOL, YO.

5hu+ +h3 f*** up!
d0 n0+ p|@y m3g@m@n 86!
g3+ r1d of 15v11h5ls w3 mu5+!

WÉ ÐØ Ñ؆ £ÍKÉ ¥ØÛ, £V§££H§15¡

But of course, rmohr02 doesn't like me either, so oh well :)

Nope -- that was how I first thought it would work, too, but apparently there are problems with doing it that way. There's a small hint about how it will work on TI's site if you read carefully, though.

-Scott

The AMS upgrades, I assume...so it must have it's own silent linking protocol which the new OS will accept. In any case, it'll be in the standard link protocol so other calc versions should be fairly simple.

<dream>just rewrite the OS so the keycodes are the same as the 89</dream>

or maybe ti will... and release a new rom version

PLAY MEGAMAN86. ITS COOL, YO.

no

nokey-dokey olie

hokey-pokey (that's what it's all about...)

thats an anti-catholic song

hokey-pokey
hocis pocis
hoc est corpus
this is my body (masses use to be in latin)

Why?

The Hokey-Pokey was written by a resident of Washington.
For better music, go to king.org and listen to the live webcast.

Well ... a couple of news items ago we were considering writing our own OS ... we decided that it would be pretty hard to do, but not exactly impossible.

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/ news/articles/3/35/35348.html

How do we know TI won't release this information? As far as I can see, they wouldn't gain anything by withholding it. I know that I personally don't want one unless there's third-party software that works with it. There are those of us who use other operating systems - I'm sure TI doesn't want to lose that market. And what about the non-flash calcs? People with non-supported calculators will also be left behind if the information isn't released. Is there any reason TI shouldn't give it out?

TI won't. It's just the way they operate, everything is closed and proprietary.

I suppose the reason TI doesn't use it outside their app is that the user would be typing text tokens, not function tokens - that is, 's', 'i', 'n', '(' (7 bytes, that is) rather than one byte, 'sin('. This would really confuse some people I know. For the keyboard to be useful (at least the way TI considers it) at the homescreen or program editor, this raw text would need to be either tokenized, or interpreted as the 68ks do.

PLAY MEGAMAN86. ITS COOL, YO.

no

nose

mouth

ear

Then how about this: they rewrite the OS, so that instead of there being a 'sin(' token it interprets 's'+'i'+'n'+'(' as the sin function- OK, it is a *huge* upgrade, but if they did it it would be really quite cool. When you press the 'sin' button it would automatically paste the 's' then the 'i' then the 'n' then the '(', so that the calc would operate in pretty much the same way to the user...

The TI-86 already does that. That's one reason I like the TI-86 the most out of all the TI-8x models.

id like that only if i was using the keyboard, else, ill stick to the 83+ menus, they're faster.

I'm not sure about the 86, but the 89 calc lets you do that. Instead of a token (like the 82/83 etc.) they use all separate characters. The only thing that would be confusing is if you press a letter, would it send the signal as [alpha]+[letter key] like they do with VTI? Becuase if they did it that way, then in ASM games, when reading Keypresses, the alpha key would be detected too.

But what about all the old BASIC games that use the one-byte tokens? (ie Disp, Pause, and, not, etc. (etc. isn't one of the tokens, it's used here to represent that the tokens I listed are only a few out of the many tokens on the TI calcs))

Oh yeah... I was just reading a website on that a while back.

I think he's talking about both. the thing about that is, if you create multi-byte tokens for the 83/+, you essentially have an 86 without the windowed menus.

The menus on the 86 are weird.

to-runs a program, you can see that it sends no alpha key, only the ascii code.

That isn't necessary. All we need is to add the tokenizer to the preparser. As it scans through the files (converting OC tokens to "real(n,") it would also search for strings of text tokens identical to function tokens, and replace them. This means the preparser might be rather slow, so perhaps controls would be needed to determine when tokenizing was necessary... but this could work, and it would be completely transparent to the user. It would also allow for many more custom functions than there are tokens, maybe even user defined ones, and would be completely backwards compatible.

That would be too much of a change, it wouldn't be an 83 afterwards.
Here's an idea, which I think is more realistic.
Maybe they could add an editor (accessable as number 2 in the apps menu, just like the finance functions ???) which would let you type using the keyboard, then converts it to tokens afterwards (86-style) if you say it's a program. If you say it's text, it stores it as an appvar (in plain ascii), which text files can later be viewed with the same program.
Whether this should be an app or incorporated in a new ROM, I really don't know.